Stop Paying Mass Murderers to Kill Our Kids

Students are brought out of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a shooting at the school

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Mass murderers kill our kids for simple reasons. The mass murder of innocents gives the murderer a powerful reward. Yes, murder pays. In fact, the payoff is huge. The payoff is also extremely reliable. As shocking as it is when our innocent children are murdered in our schools, we are not coming anywhere close to best practice in our effort to stop these horrific events. The sad fact is that mass murderers are learning and reacting faster than we are. Murderers are learning faster than our politicians and our school officials. Murderers are certainly learning faster than our news media. It is time for parents and other concerned citizens to change that. We know how to stop these attacks. Here is what you can do to make our kids safer.

Where do we fall short?

The murderers learned their lessons well. Their attacks follow a pattern and have a high probability of success. Some schools have a “full time” law enforcement officer at the school. That sounds good, but is a bad plan. Many schools are not given that much protection and they have to share an officer between several schools or between widely separated buildings. Stationing a law enforcement officer at the school may provide political cover for the sheriff and school board, but it is far from best practice. Are children gathered in a school location that is several minutes from the School Resource Officer? Are many children at school when there is not an armed adult protecting them? The answers are almost certainly ‘Yes!’ Are children off campus with a school activity when they are unprotected? I’m sure they are.

Murderers learned from our mistakes. They to attack the school before staff are in place. The murderers learned to attack the School Resource Officer first, or to wait until the SRO is away from the scene. In contrast, armed volunteers who carry concealed are harder to spot. Best practice says that there should be several armed responders with the students at all times. That usually means that volunteer staff carry concealed while wearing plain clothes.

Two NYPD School Safety patrol cars parked outside a school on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan before the morning rush hour.

We need an armed responder in every building. We want to have a responder on every hallway. For each armed responder, we’d ideally have several additional staff members who are trained in emergency trauma care. Medical training is important and achievable. Implementing an armed responder program might take months. Consider that we can provide medical training to school staff this weekend. As surprising as this claim may sound, these armed and trained staff can cost the school almost nothing.

Murderers learned that it is virtually impossible to enter a prepared and protected classroom. Preparing that classroom cost only a few dollars per door and per window. Unfortunately, the murderers changed their tactics. Now, murderers simply pull the fire alarm. That gives the murderers a hallway full of unprotected targets.

Best practice is to let the fire alarm ring directly at the fire station and at the school offices, but to not sound the alarm within the school until the presence of a fire is verified by school staff. That might only involve verification that a smoke detector went off at the same time as the alarm was pulled. Verification could involve video confirmation, or a call to a teachers on that hallway. The appropriate response varies depending on conditions. For example, the alarm might sound inside the school if the building is thinly unoccupied over the weekend versus using a silent alarm when the building is full of students during the week.

Murderers are working around the silent alarm by bringing explosives to school. An explosion creates chaos and will probably flood the hallways. The bomb threat does other things as well. A suspicious parcel with some flares and batteries will keep emergency medical responders far away from the scene. That delayed medical response results in more deaths.

Here is what you can do

Ask your school principal when the school had their last safety audit. What were the findings? Were changes put in place to make your school safer as a result of the school safety survey? How are bullying and threats of violence reported and acted on? Those are simple questions that any concerned citizen can ask of their local school officials. Those are questions that school officials should be able to answer.

Look at the Underlying Cause of the Attacks

We reward attacks. Our culture is saturated with news and entertainment media. Young people are particularly obsessed with celebrities. Consider that our high school students might not be able to name the governor of their state, but they can name several popular actors and singers.

We elevate these mass murders to rock-star status, and that is why these murderers kill our kids.

When you turn psychopaths into celebrities..then you get more psychopaths. The copycats take 4 to 6 weeks to hatch their plans. We saw over 70 copycat attempts after the mass murders at Columbine High School. Trends are headed in the wrong direction, and media coverage of mass murder has increased since that attack took place.

The personal motivations of these mass murderers is clear. Whatever their perceived grievance might be, psychopaths kill innocent people in order to receive a large fortune in free publicity. We deliver that reward to them time after time. Our news outlets provide a public relations media marketing campaign for every mass murderer. The murderer’s face is spread across the television news shows for hours on end. Television and radio mention the murderer’s name several times an hour. That level of promotion would normally cost a company or a politician about $70 million per hour. The media provides that level of notoriety to the killer.. and we pay the price.

The media coverage is extensive and persistent. The murderer’s atrocity is reported on multiple media outlets from coast to coast. The coverage lasts for days. Think about that. How many copycat school murders could you buy, how many could you create, with 2 billion dollars of publicity? Do the math yourself. We are paying to get our kids killed.

Local and National Solutions

Pass local ordinances that make it illegal to report the name and show the image of mass murderers. Ask companies and politicians to boycott media channels that promote mass murderers.

At the individual level, we can talk to advertisers directly. Tell advertiser that we won’t buy their products because they advertised on stations that put our children at risk. National legislation can follow suit.